A Sweet Celebration, Secretly Recorded

By

Doug Ramsey

January 19, 2012

In 1981, when Jan Lundgren was 15, he was so good at tennis that he won a competition among young Swedish players. The prize was a week of lessons with the world's champion, Björn Borg. As it turned out, scheduling made it impossible for Mr. Borg to give the lessons. And Mr. Lundgren, who had studied classical piano since the age of 5, had found another love by then—jazz.

A year before the tennis adventure, a pianist substituting for Mr. Lundgren's regular music teacher had given the teenager an unusual assignment—buy an Oscar Peterson record. He bought Peterson's 1962 trio album "Night Train." "I went home with the recording, put it onto the record player and was astonished because I had never heard music like that before in my life," Mr. Lundgren said in 2008. "This music had a strong impact on me. I didn't know then that I would become a jazz pianist, but I knew that I had fallen in love with this music."

ENLARGE

Jan Lundgren
Ziga Korotnik

After high school, Mr. Lundgren continued his classical studies at the Royal College of Music in Malmö, refined his jazz skills and was discovered by alto saxophonist Arne Domnérus, a hero of Swedish jazz. Soon, the music student was playing jazz engagements with Domnérus, saxophonist Bernt Rosengren and clarinetist Putte Wickman. Peterson's high level of improvisation and swing provided a foundation, but Mr. Lundgren's stylistic horizon widened to include Bill Evans, Tommy Flanagan, Jimmy Rowles and other noted pianists. By the mid-1990s, he moved into the first rank of European jazz pianists with international followings, and at age 45 continues to be in demand in Europe and Asia for concerts and recordings. His personal appearances and albums sell out in Japan. He has recorded 12 CDs in the U.S. In November, he toured in India.

In concerts Mr. Lundgren often credits Peterson, who died in 2007, with igniting his passion for jazz. He does so again in his most recent album as he introduces his poignant, unaccompanied performance of "Tenderly," a song indelibly associated with Peterson. The album, "Together Again . . . At the Jazz Bakery" (Fresh Sound), is remarkable on two counts: for the playing of Mr. Lundgren, bassist Chuck Berghofer and drummer Joe La Barbera; and for existing at all. It was not intended to become an album. In early 2008, the veteran producer Dick Bank was working with the trio on another project. For reference purposes, he captured the concert at the Jazz Bakery in Los Angeles on a two-track digital audio-tape recorder, a far cry from the sophisticated 12-track machines used in studios to capture every sonic subtlety. Mr. Bank had the tape transferred to CD, put the disc in the player in his car's trunk, and forgot about it. When, two years later, he finally got around to listening to it, he was astonished.

In the notes for the album, Mr. Bank quotes himself that day: "'This is good. This is really good. This has to come out!'" He gave the tape to editing engineer Talley Sherwood, who improved the recording by eliminating the pauses between pieces in the live performance, but the sound remained short of the fullness Mr. Bank wanted. Mr. Bank then took the problem to Bernie Grundman, a mastering engineer known for resuscitating hopeless recordings. His console can control 38 audio frequencies, as many as 18 at a time. Most challenging of all, Mr. Bank considered the small Yamaha grand piano inadequate. "We worked with the piano sound," he told me, "so that it could be mistaken for a Steinway Concert Grand. My original recording could never have been released commercially." It took six months of painstaking trial runs and reference discs before the balance, depth and relationships among the instruments satisfied Mr. Bank.

After the rigors of the audio rescue, how is the music? Mr. Lundgren, who did not know the concert had been recorded, listened to the album and then broke through his modesty, Swedish reserve and customary self-criticism. Responding to a recent email query, he likely exhausted his lifetime allotment of exclamation points: "I am very happy!! What a great surprise!! I am proud!! Some of my best playing!! Great!!" It requires no suspension of disbelief to agree. Mr. Lundgren's clarity of execution matches the clarity of his ideas. He is at the top of his game in all of the elements of jazz pianism: touch, dynamics, harmonic imagination, swing, power and delicacy. In Mr. Bank's stealth recording, the teamwork of Messrs. Lundgren, Berghofer and La Barbera in their concert of American Songbook standards and jazz classics equals or exceeds that of their previous encounters.

Mr. Lundgren now turns part of his attention to artistic directorship of the jazz festival he helped found in the southern Swedish seaside town of Ystad. This year it will be held Aug. 2-5. The 2011 festival included world-class musicians Toots Thielemans, Herb Geller, Pat Martino and Dave Douglas; the Korean singer Youn Sun Nah; players from throughout Scandinavia and other parts of Europe; and a contingent of mainstream musicians from New York. Jazz festivals around the world are attempting to shore up attendance by including pop, rock and folk music. In Ystad, Mr. Lundgren managed to maintain artistic integrity and attract sellout crowds. As for his own playing, his unaccompanied performance of Thelonious Monk's "'Round Midnight" drew praise in Britain's Jazz Journal as a "riveting reinvention." It brought him a standing ovation.

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